


Shall Possess

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 21:04:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: Thor and Loki rest and reflect.





	Shall Possess

  
  


The sun had sunk far enough below the horizon that the top of Stark tower, always the last place to lose its light, was now in Earth’s shadow. The setting was a shock to all but Thor, who, with six stones in his hand, was collecting his friends on the roof. He arranged them in a circle, at the center of which floated a small globe of gold light not much larger than an apple.

“How much did we miss,” Loki asked. Those who had been distracted by the sudden changes in their surroundings and activities flinched on hearing his voice.

“It varies,” Thor said.

“Whose blood is that?” Loki asked, inclining his head to the splash of it drying on Thor’s right arm.

“Thanos’s.”

“And where might he be?” Loki feigned breeziness that only Thor could read as false.

“Dead,” Thor replied. “I killed him-” Thor paused, narrowed his eyes, and shook his head, “two minutes ago.”

Thor could hear the quick breaths his friends had drawn in unison. Not relief, though the news was soothing, but shock at hearing Thor put so plainly the act they were all afraid to name.

“Did you cut off his arm to get the gauntlet?” Loki asked.

“I did,” Thor nodded, and Loki bit back a grin.

The thrill faded as he felt magic swell beside him. He caught the turn of Strange’s head out of the corner of his eye and knew the doctor had felt it to. Red light was gathering around Maximoff’s fingers.

“Where’s Vision?” she asked.

“His body is there,” Thor replied, pointing at the light that was floating in their midst.

“Why didn’t you bring him back?”

“I did,” Thor said, and she went white while the light at her fingertips briefly dimmed, then redoubled. “I asked him what to do,” Thor continued, “and this was his answer.”

“He needs to talk to me about it.”

Her magic was still expanding with her anger. Loki saw subtle movements in Strange’s fingers as he readied spells in case she needed to be contained.  
“Did you bring back our father?” Loki asked.

“No,” Thor shook his head.

“What about Hogun, Fandral, and Volstagg?”

“No.”

“Not even your oldest, closest friends?” Loki asked, and again only Thor caught the false note of horror in his voice. Thor read its purpose and went along. “What about the thousands of our people Hela slaughtered?”

“No,” Thor said, and the brothers saw their companions shifting uneasily and lowering their eyes.

“Our _realm_?” Loki tried.

“No.”

“Our mother?” Loki breathed, nothing feigned now, hopeful in a way that made him hate himself and all the realms.

“No,” Thor said again, and heard a small sob beside him.

Wanda was crying with as much calm as anyone in such a state could manage. Thor gave a slow blink of thanks to his brother and looked up again at the little ball of light that was still glowing over their heads.

“That’s only his body,” Thor reminded. “We turn the remains of our dead into stars. I thought I’d give him an Asgardian funeral if you didn’t mind.” Wanda nodded her approval and stared at Thor. A few eyes widened as the minds behind them tried to wrap themselves around the thought of casually igniting stars that, by the known laws of physics, should have been too small to burn. “If you want to talk to him again, his mind is back where it began. I’m not sure if he prefers Vision or Jarvis now,” Thor admitted. “I forgot to ask. Once you go inside, you can ask him yourself.”

 

When the light from Vision’s body had gone so high it was only a speck, Maximoff sprinted into the tower.

 

“What are you going to do with those?” Strange asked, looking at the stones in Thor’s cupped palm.

“I do have one idea,” Thor confessed, frowning as he focused on the gems.

The stones lined up in two neat rows, then seemed almost to melt, swirling and blending until they had acquired a mineral, fractured streaking reminiscent of the Bifrost. Their new shape was that of a small brick with a cylindrical notch in the center of one of its long sides. From that notch, a stem grew until it had achieved a length of ten inches. Bands of runes wrapped around the angular head of the tiny hammer.

“You’re joking,” Loki huffed. He leaned in to peer at the writing and read the words aloud to himself. “‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if they be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.’” Loki stared at his brother. “I can’t believe you.”

“It worked so well the first time,” Thor shrugged. He hung the hammer from his belt while Loki shook his head in what was more resignation now than disbelief.

  


The allies dined together while Thor filled in the gaps in their experiences and memories. They nodded when he said that half the lives in the realms had ended. It was an idea to them rather than a reality. Thor’s reality had been amplified by the stones. A googleplex didn’t begin to account for it. Crickets, tadpoles, humans, Asgardians, trees, bacteria. Thor saw them all die and brought them all back. Half his friends looked like ghosts to him now. With his brother, at least, Thor had practice, and Loki’s mercurial nature made the change seem less unnatural.

 

Conversation during the meal was otherwise lacking, but company was welcome. The friends occupied themselves by laughing at their fruitless attempts to lift the little hammer. This time they felt reassured each time it rejected them--the burden was not theirs. Stark watched as Rogers, Banner, and even Pepper failed to lift it. He had thought that if anyone stood a chance it was her. Across the table, he saw Loki gazing unblinking at his brother with unguarded reverence and a flickering, insuppressible smile. Tony supposed that only someone who had seen a millennium of life and of Thor could begin to properly appraise who Thor was and what he had done. He wondered if Thor knew it himself.

 

After dinner Stark watched the brothers walk--sway, in Thor’s case--slowly down the hall. He saw Loki’s silently offered arm and saw Thor take it and use it to tug his brother flush against his side. He thought of hydrogen. One positively charged proton and one negatively charged electron bound together. That atom fueled stars, made up two thirds of every water molecule, and accounted for three quarters of the mass in the universe. It was easy to assume Thor was the central, positive particle, but his association with lightning made Stark rethink it. Thor was something volatile bound to something constant. If there was a bad choice to be made, Loki made it, and if that wasn’t reliable Tony didn’t know what was. You could set your watch by it. The god of mischief vibrated at a frequency as consistent as quartz. It was Thor who had careened wildly through life. Desiring power and gaining it. Having it all without knowing it. Losing everything and longing for it. Letting go, thereby regaining it. Wanting less and less only to be saddled with more and more until the fate of every universe was held in one of his hands. Tony had just dined with the actual Atlas, who was now receding down the hall with his reliable mess of a little brother and all the realms balanced neatly on his shoulders.

 

He wondered if Thor had seen it coming. If, as the god of the sky, and the sky being, ultimately, everything, Thor had done the math and figured out what he was in for. If it was a surprise, Thor was taking it well.

 

Stark silently deleted the _demi_ from his earlier designation of Thor and made a mental note to provide added protection for Loki.

  
  


“Are we going back to Norway tonight?” Loki asked, locking the door behind them and staring at the slight sag in his brother’s posture. Thor’s muscles were so firm they wouldn’t allow for much, but if you’d been looking at them for as long as Loki had, it was impossible to miss the slouch.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Thor said, leaving a trail of clothing on the floor behind him as he made his way to the bath. “Heimdall can more than manage. I’m tired.”

Loki nodded and waved his own clothes away, then sat on the edge of the tub and fiddled with the knobs until the water roaring out of the tap was the right temperature. Stark had fitted Thor’s room with its own hot water heater so that Thor could turn it up to a few degrees below boiling, which was what it took to soothe Asgardian bones.

 

They sank into the bath with sighs that bordered on sobs and stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the entirety of Thor’s apartment. Being able to look out onto a world from any room was familiar from home, but few of Asgard’s windows were glassed. The substance was reserved primarily for prison cells.

 

Loki dimmed the lights lower and lower, looking for stars, until the bulbs were out and he realized it was hopeless.

“Can you see it?” Loki asked, squinting at the sky.

“Vision’s star?” Thor said, and Loki nodded. “No, there’s too much light pollution. And _air_ pollution.”

“The sky at home was so clear we could count galaxies by day,” Loki murmured. “It never occurred to me… The sky here just feels dead. All grey. And the glass shuts out all the sounds. Not that there’s anything to listen to beyond the drone of engines and the honking of horns. No toads or robins singing. No wind rustling the leaves. No birds, toads, or leaves, for that matter.” Loki paused to listen and caught only the hum of electricity, the dull roar of air in vents, and the tiny gurgle of the bathwater where it shifted around their skin. “It’s like a tomb,” Loki sighed, turning away from the window and sinking into the water. Thor smiled above closed eyes.

“The air in the vents is the wind under the door of the crypt,” Thor said, looking at the ceiling to where the ducts lay hidden behind drywall. He raised his hand and let water drip from his fingertips and splash quietly back into the tub. “That’s the rain trickling down the tree roots that have crept between the stones. And these are the worms eating us up,” Thor finished, wiggling his toes against the backs of Loki’s thighs and grinning.

Loki wrinkled his nose above a smile and gave a token whine.

 

They rested, hearing each other’s breathing as it gusted through their noses and echoed off the porcelain tiles and basins and the surface of the water.

“What would you say at my funeral?” Loki wondered aloud, opening his eyes just in time to catch Thor opening his own.

“That I’m sick of outliving you,” Thor scolded, with a tone meant to be playful, badly masking that the words were entirely meant.

“But you’ve never outlived me,” Loki reminded, and gently knocked Thor’s hips with the insides of his ankles.

“Three times now.”

“Never,” Loki corrected.

“Well, it was real each time for me,” Thor sighed, shutting his eyes again. “Truth is relative.”

Loki opened his mouth but no words came.

 

Some part of Thor had been lost. Or the world that Thor deserved had been burned away. What remained of the realms could never match him now. Everything had grown unworthy, or, rather, had remained the same and failed to keep up. Life for Thor was something false. Unreliable. Always failing him. Most beings were helpless and draining. Probably parasitic. Loki was confident his brother would never actually accuse them of such things--or even think it of them-- but that didn’t mean they were untrue.

 

“The new eye is a good match,” Loki noted, hoping it would coax Thor into opening the pair. He was rewarded with a flutter of lashes, a low hum, a nod, and then eye contact. His skin drew tight into goosebumps despite the two hundred degree bath.

“I thought it would be rude to refuse or undo the gift,” Thor said. “And I’ve got my depth perception back, which saves my neck. I kept darting my head from side to side, trying to gauge distances. Gave me an ache.”

 

Thor patted his own chest and Loki nodded, turned, and slid backward until he had slotted in to sit between Thor’s legs with his back against Thor’s front and his head propped up on his brother’s shoulder. Thor slid his arms around Loki’s waist and knitted his fingers together, letting the width of his knuckles lock his hands in place.

 

Loki could feel Thor’s nose nudging his skull where it pressed into his hair, breathing him in and puffing warm air out against his scalp. Thor rocked their bodies gently from side to side, setting the water swaying along with them, and hummed a tune their grandmother had made up a thousand years before they were born.

 

They dozed for half an hour and woke to cold water.

“Bath’s a bit dingy, and we haven’t properly washed ourselves yet,” Loki said.

“Shower?” Thor asked, and Loki nodded.

 

They scrubbed and kneaded each other’s bodies with a pressure no human masseur could ever hope to match, untying knots and stretching muscles that had shortened from a decade of tension. Calming each other with long, slow strokes to each other’s backs as they leaned against each other under the spray, breast to breast, with the sides of their faces pressed together. When their joints were once again supple, Thor turned it into kissing, dipping his head to press a line of pecks up the side of Loki’s neck, along the sharp bend of his jaw, and up over his chin, where Thor left his lips flush with his brother’s and let himself stare into sad green eyes he thought he’d never see again.

 

When all the blood and filth that had collected under their nails and gotten stuck in their knuckles had been cleared away, they declared themselves clean and dripped their way across the room. The heat and kneading left them heavy and boneless. They leaned against the counter for support as they patted their skin dry and stared at each other, absentmindedly taking measure. A new scar here, shiny and pink. An old one there, subtle and white. An extra bit of muscle winding through the upper arms and shoulders, wrought by more time spent swinging weapons and lifting great weights. Fat gone from faces, fingers, and shins. Blue veins showing plainly on forearms, hands, and feet. The arcs of ribs flashing with every bend at the waist.

 

“Sorry,” Thor said, closing his eyes and wincing at himself as he flipped off the bathroom lights. “I didn’t even think to ask. Did you want to go back to Norway tonight? We can-”

“No,” Loki soothed. “I’m tired too. These rooms are plain, boring, quiet, and, oddly enough, perfect. I think this about all I can take at the moment.”

“Exactly,” Thor sighed. “It’s like being asleep with your eyes open.”

Loki laughed and nodded as he bent to turn down the bed. He felt Thor’s nails bounce lightly down the knobs of his spine on their way to scratch the smooth skin at the base of his back. He paused and let this pleasure go on for five minutes until Thor finally laughed, patted him on the bottom, and gave him a nudge to make him crawl across mattress. Thor all but fell in beside him and they let out long, simultaneous sighs. They turned out the lamps, as much to stop the buzzing of the bulbs and wires as to darken the room, and settled on their backs. They heard the quiet, irregular breathing of restless, frightened minds. Every so often Loki would catch Thor drawing a full breath and slowly letting it out again.

“Does it feel like your lungs won’t quite fill to the brim and if you could just manage one real yawn you might get somewhere with sleeping?” Loki asked.

“Get out of my head,” Thor chided, teasing, then groaned and pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “It feels like my wires are crossed.”

“I know,” Loki agreed. “I’m completely exhausted and I’m wide awake. Why can’t the liquor here be decent? If we could just get really drunk.”

“It’s worse than water,” Thor laughed, nodding. “It’s just strong enough that it lets you hope something might come of it if you work fast. But our metabolisms burn through it before the next glass is poured.”

 

After another half-hour had passed without the faintest whiff of sleep, Loki whimpered and rolled over to stuff his face under the side of Thor’s shoulder.

“Hibernating?” Thor asked, and felt Loki nod against him. “How goes it?”

“Hopeless,” came the muffled reply, and Loki rolled onto his back again with a pouting huff. “Smells good though.”

“Small mercies,” Thor said, and nudged his brother with his elbow.

 

Loki fell into his restless habit of playing with magic, casting two small points of light above their heads and making them take turns circling each other. The effect was not as soothing as he would have liked, so he set the ceiling rippling like water and sent red fish swimming through it in lazy figure eights.

“Were you sniffing my hair in the bath?” Loki asked.

“I was,” Thor nodded, smiling and half turning his head to peer at Loki from the corner of his left eye. Loki raised one expectant eyebrow. “You smell the same,” Thor said. “I know we look older. _Are_ older… the last ten years have taken their toll. And our voices grow rougher and deeper by the minute. But your hair and skin smell exactly as I remember  them.”

“Mmm,” Loki agreed. ‘You still smell like you too.”

“When I was little, you said I stank,” Thor noted. His eyes were sparkling and his lips were pinching back the grin that his cheeks were trying to raise

“That wasn’t so much you as whatever you’d gotten into. You were always in the pen with the goats or sloshing through the swamps after watersnakes.”

“True.”

“And it was always a fight to get you into the bath.”

“I thought it was a waste of time,” Thor shrugged. “I was just going to get filthy again first thing in the morning.”

“You wouldn’t behave for the maids. They never once got you in the tub, and it was not for lack of trying. Father tried once and lost,” Loki remembered, and more words were briefly prevented by laughter. He sniffed and cleared his throat. “Mother always had to… practically _seduce_ you into it. You shit.”

“That was another reason to resist,” Thor said, blushing and biting his lip. “If I held out long enough, I got _her_.”

Loki’s face opened into a round, delighted gape as the ceiling blurred with tears and the bouncing of their laughing bodies.

“How did she ever put up with us?” Loki breathed.

“I have no idea.”

 

Loki felt his brother shift beside him and he tipped slightly down to his right as Thor rolled toward him and propped his head up on one elbow. His chest tingled pleasantly where Thor drew mindless patterns over his solar plexus with one warm fingertip.

“Apart from complaining that I’m sick of outliving you, which I _am_ and _would_ ,” Thor said firmly, and Loki stopped breathing to keep from missing so much as a syllable. “I suppose I’d say… that I _love_ you--that will always be in the present tense. That, if it’s better to regret the things you’ve done than the things you haven’t done, then no one could hope to live half as well as you have. You’ve tried everything. Been fearless. Or, if not fearless, then impossible to deter, which is often just as good. _Brave_ ,” Thor murmured. “That’s the word for it. I’d say--and I’d mean it--that you never failed me, even if I couldn’t see it at the time. That you always taught me exactly what I needed to learn. Gave me what I needed even if it wasn’t what I wanted… like an older brother--or a parent--might. A best friend. And that you’ve always been yourself. Fluid and relentless. Never static or restrained. A thrill. I’ll be in your debt until the end of my days.”  

 

Thor listened to his brother’s wet, stuttering intake of breath and flattened his hand against Loki’s belly to rub light, soothing circles onto it.

 

“And what about you?” Loki asked. His voice was choked, thick and nasal. Mostly breath.

“What about me?”

“What do you want said about you?”

“What do I care?” Thor shrugged. “I’ll be dead. Won’t have to worry about it. Isn’t that one of the few perks of being dead? That you don’t know the difference?”

“But you’re not dead _now_ ,” Loki sighed, and Thor could hear rolled eyes in the tone. “Surely you want to be remembered.”

“Remembrance is for the dead,” Thor said, shaking his head and lifting his hand to trace the hollow at the base of Loki’s throat. “I want to be _known_ now. Everything that comes after is irrelevant.”

“A stinky, uncooperative boy,” Loki began, and Thor nodded once. “Pest to his mother.” Thor nodded again. “Occasional cyclops,” Loki continued, and heard a soft puff of laughter shoot through Thor’s nose. “God of Thunder and the skies. Friend to misfits of every flavor,” Loki smiled, and Thor wondered if his brother counted himself among that number. “Casually Supreme Being,” Loki said, and in the low light could not make out whether a blush had coincided with Thor’s bashful duck of the head. Loki called more lights. “Joy and loyalty incarnate. Son. Friend. Brother. And the be-all and end-all in bed,” Loki finished, and Thor barked a laugh and dropped his head to Loki’s breast. Loki raked his fingers through his brother’s messy crop. “If you ever stick me with outliving you, I’m telling everyone,” Loki murmured. “Bragging about it would be the sole consolation.” Loki felt another faint puff of laughter against his chest and a few wet, tickling tears dotted his skin. He kept combing Thor’s hair with his fingers until he and his brother were breathing at the same slow, even pace.

“When I think back,” Thor began softly, “we had it right when we were teenagers. Spent every spare minute in bed, laughing and talking and making love. But we didn’t believe it could be that easy. Thought we must have been missing something. Set off on a hopeless quest for… for who-knows-what. For the answer we already had. Chased our own tails for a thousand years…”

“But now we’re back where we started,” Loki soothed, and Thor straightened to press a grateful kiss to Loki’s forehead before tucking himself into Loki’s side. “Normally it feels like failure to land yourself back at the beginning,” Loki noted. “I don’t know about you, but I feel more like the cat that got the cream.”

Thor hummed and wrapped an arm and a leg around his brother.

  


To describe the way he felt when he was with Thor, Loki would have used the same words that had occurred to him a thousand years before: urgent, needy, and raw. But they were not true now in the senses they had been then, though they were still true.

 

At fifteen, Loki’s love for Thor had filled him so completely that it had been in constant danger of spilling out his mouth and into the wrong ears without his meaning it to. His heart had given him a delicious, desperate tunnel-vision. Thor had been all he could see, and every day that had passed without telling Thor as much had felt like a kind of living death to him. Letting Thor know had been as urgent as breathing. Now Thor knew, but things were no less urgent, for Loki had seen the hourglass running down.

 

Before, Loki had felt needy because he hadn’t known how much his brother loved him. He’d craved proof. Constant reassurances. Evidence to hold up in the face of doubt. Now he knew Thor thought the sun rose and set with him. Instead, Loki needed to be certain that Thor knew it was requited.

 

The rawness Loki remembered had, back then, been born of fear. Loki’s dread of being laughed at or rejected by the one he loved most when he was at his most vulnerable had, those first few nights, left him all but paralyzed in Thor’s arms. Now Loki felt raw in a way that was receptive, essential, and unflinching. Rather than causing him to freeze up, slam shut, and brace for impact, it enabled him to feel even the simplest things more deeply. When Thor held Loki’s face in both hands and stared him in the eyes, Loki no longer thought Thor was seeking and finding faults. Now Loki let himself stare back, and in the face across from his own he found a mirror. Saw someone who was trying just as hard as he was to see and be seen, to know and be known, to say and hear the thousand things for which, despite a trillion languages and fourteen billion years, no one had yet found the words.

 

Loki was no longer caught up in his own blood’s undertow. Not a gangly, fragile, adolescent running on a volatile cocktail of hormones and fear. He was harder, colder, stronger, and wise enough to protect the one thing left in him that held warmth. He thought of their father’s advice as he and Thor were about to set out on their first winter hunt unchaperoned: you don’t worry about your toes if you’re caught in the snow, you take care of your core.

  


Thor was kissing his way across Loki’s upper lip in tiny increments. It made Loki think of the inching pace of caterpillars, which then led his mind to butterflies. Thor’s kisses curved up to follow Loki’s smile. When Thor had reached the corner of his mouth, Loki guided Thor’s cheekbone to his eye and fluttered his lashes against it. He felt Thor’s belly flexing with amusement against his side and got a long, deep kiss of thanks for his trouble.

“You still taste the same,” Loki said.

“So do you,” Thor smiled. “I thought it would be one of the first things to go, given all the strange things we’ve been eating.”

“Yes the food here--and everywhere now, for that matter--is always odd. Garlic is…”

“Dragon’s breath,” Thor finished, wrinkling his nose, and Loki nodded. “Has your stomach been all right?”  

“Yes and no,” Loki sighed. “Nothing has disagreed with me exactly, I’m just left tired and hungry all the time.”

“I know,” Thor nodded. He gave his brother a sympathetic grimace and then looked down at Loki’s chest, where the ribs were visible around his sternum through his pectorals. “There aren’t any plants or animals with flesh as dense as what lived on Asgard. Here they’re mostly water, so they fill you up fast enough, but not with substance.”

 

They traded apologetic kisses until they forgot what they were sorry about. Each time Thor set his lips to Loki’s neck, Loki tipped his head back further, offering up more throat. Thor kissed each newly exposed place--the knob of bone behind the ear, the knot at the front of the throat, the hollow hidden under the jaw. He knew Loki liked to have the top of his breast kissed, just below the collarbones, and he leaned over to cover the place in soft nips and pecks until the whole of Loki’s chest was rising and falling with deep, swift breaths.

 

When he was with anyone else, Loki left things up to them. It amused him to see what they’d do, and he was too secretive and indifferent to give them anything. He’d simply stretch out and wait for the show. They only ever came up with two things to do to him, which were ultimately quite similar. Some did one, some did the other, some did both, but only in one order. All were hasty, unimaginative partners who, if they kissed at all, treated it as an extension of fucking rather than an end in itself. Loki used them as a yardstick by which Thor grew taller with each measuring.

 

Thor’s fingers nudged at Loki’s side, urging it up, and Loki followed their directions and rolled until Thor had both hands on Loki’s waist and was steering Loki’s body onto his own. As he was turning to settle on top of his brother, Loki saw the hammer on the console just inside the door.

 

He hadn’t been kidding when he’d called Thor Casually Supreme Being. And he hadn’t been wrong. He’d just been more focused on the _Casually_ than on the _Supreme Being_ . With the power of the stones, Thor could do anything, have anything, and be anywhere. And he was here, laid out under Loki’s body with his legs slowly spreading, sliding up the outsides of Loki’s thighs. Holding Loki close with his fingers splayed across the base of his back and the hollow between his shoulder blades. Kissing Loki’s face so softly, happily, and affectionately that Loki couldn’t work out whether he should deny the title of kiss to what everyone else did when they attempted it, or invent a new word for what Thor was doing. He decided on the former, in part because the best he could presently come up with for the latter was _Thoring_ , which sounded inadequate even if it was accurate.

 

Loki took Thor’s head in his hands again and guided it this way and that beneath his lips, kissing the deep lines won by countless smiles, the knot in the bridge of his nose from a break six hundred years ago, and the folds between his eyebrows wrought by worry--a great deal of which Loki knew himself to be responsible for. He felt Thor’s ankles lock behind his back and then Thor’s knees bent to give Loki’s body series of light, urging tugs that left Loki laughing and shaking his head.

“Is there anything in these nightstands, or will we have to resort to the kitchen?”

“Shit. I’m not sure,” Thor sighed, releasing his octopus grip on his brother. “It’s been so long since I stayed here. Try the one on your right.”

Loki found a small bottle, flipped it open, and sniffed it.

“Doesn’t seem to have gone off.” He poured some into his palm, peered at the fluid, and nodded his approval, then carefully coated his skin. Thor looked on with his knees in the air and his ass canted up like a hint, as if Loki could forget what he was meant to do next.

“Eager,” Loki teased.

“It’s been ages,” Thor defended, nearly whining. He was still staring, with his long neck craned to let him see through the gap between his legs.

“It’s been _days_ ,” Loki corrected, and then regretted reminding his brother of anything that occurred between the destruction of Asgard and the present, even if it had been the high point.

Thor dropped his head back on the pillow.

“Well it _felt_ like ages,” he huffed, and then bounced his ass on the bed in a performance of impatience that set Loki laughing even as he hovered over his brother and lowered his hips. “Quit giggling,” Thor scolded, “it’s ruining your aim.”

“It’s your own fault,” Loki said, laughing harder.

“That’s the third time you’ve jabbed me in the balls!”

“If I weren’t laughing, I’d be hitting them with every attempt.”

Thor snorted and set off more giggling, which made tears spill from Loki’s eyes and splash onto Thor’s throat. They calmed themselves by drying each other’s cheeks.

“Ready?” Loki asked, and Thor nodded and drew a deep breath.

 

Loki felt the warm gust from Thor’s lungs flow out across his face a split-second after he heard the soft, breathy _oh_ that had come with it. Equal parts laughter, relief, and greeting. The slick, smooth heat within Thor’s body was another constant, indistinguishable to Loki from the first time he’d felt it. Bracing and grounding, but no less a thrill. It made his whole body hum without ever numbing him or wearing on his nerves. He ducked his chin and let his forehead come to rest against his brother’s.

 

Thor was gently rubbing Loki’s flanks with slow passes of his hands. Looking up at him with warm eyes and a soft smile that was etched, somehow, into every one of his features. Loki dipped his mouth to thank each one, kissing them before stroking them with the cool tip of his nose.

 

When Loki had stopped kissing and gone back to staring, Thor shook out his brother’s curls so that they hung down around their faces, scenting the air and softening it with the water still held in the strands. Then he wrapped his arms tight around Loki’s ribs and swayed from side to side, rocking their bodies slowly, soothing them halfway to sleep with the rustle of sheets and the tide of their breathing.

“I’ll never understand,” Loki murmured, pausing in his mouthing of Thor’s lower lip.

“Hmm?”

“Why everyone rushes to the ending, rutting like beasts.”

“Mmm,” Thor nodded. “They could get the same thing alone with their hands.”

“Exactly.”

“Life is short, I suppose,” Thor offered. “Perhaps they’re worried that it’s now or never.”

“Yes, but when _now_ is going this well, _never_ is obviously off the table,” Loki shifted his hips just far enough to make Thor’s eyelashes flutter. “So why not linger?”

“I have no idea,” Thor admitted, still blinking fast, gone slightly breathless.  

“Thank the Norns,” Loki whispered, and kissed his brother’s cheek.

 

**Author's Note:**

> please don't comment or repost.


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